GloboSale Goes Down

GloboSale is the latest casualty in the fight to stay alive in the post-Visa regulations battlefield.

A press release from Chairman Andreas De Terra on GloboSale.net states, “What happened to others in this industry in the past happened to us today. What we think is an unfortunate example from Visa, we have been advised that our bank was instructed today to terminate our processing in order to avoid threatened fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“We are very disappointed with the sudden situation which terminated GloboSale.net AG operations within a matter of hours,” De Terra wrote. “Not only have we been accused of wrongdoing without any proof from Visa, [but] Visa also abruptly terminated our contracts without prior consultations.”

The statement noted that over 6,000 Webmasters will be affected by the shutdown and their user management will stay active until the expiration of the last user subscription. De Terra recommend alternative billing solution provider Verotel and ask that Webmasters correspond in writing to their corporate address in the meantime:

GloboSale.net AG

P.O. Box 501

8702 Erlenbach

Switzerland

As of October 1, Visa will lower their monitoring thresholds of its “Merchant Chargeback Monitoring Program” for all merchants, regardless of their business classification, from 2.5 percent of sales to 1 percent for domestic transactions. In conjunction with that threshold decrease, Visa has raised the minimum number of chargebacks threshold to 100 per month, up from 50 per month.

In addition, as of January 1, 2004, Visa will alter its “Global Merchant Chargeback Monitoring Program” from 2.5 percent of sales for international chargebacks to 2 percent, and increase the minimum number of chargebacks from 100 to 200.